LABOUR REALLY ISN’T WORKING

The secret of the party’s terminal disease... and it isn’t Corbyn

EVERY pandemic requires a host. A malign protagonist who contaminates everyone and everything they touch. In the scientific community this hapless individual is commonly referred to as The Index Case, or Patient Zero.

This morning, as Labour surveys the barren wasteland of Copeland and Stoke, the party believes it has successfully identified its own Patient Zero.

‘Jeremy Corbyn is toxic on the doorsteps, that’s the reason we lost Copeland,’ a Shadow Minister told me. ‘In Stoke, Paul Nuttall was even more toxic, which is why we hung on. The integrity of the Labour brand is still intact. But lifelong Labour voters were saying, “Sorry, but we can’t back you while Corbyn is leader.”’

It is a seductive analysis. In Stoke, supposedly the night’s success story for Labour, its majority was cut in half, but Ukip stalled and the party survived.

In Copeland, Labour suffered what respected BBC analyst John Curtice said was the worst result for an Opposition ‘in the whole history of post-war British byelections’. Which, if anything, understates the scale of the defeat.

Faced with the possible closure of a local maternity unit, Labour distributed leaflets warning that if voters didn’t back Corbyn’s party they would die. The people of Copeland opted for death.

But despite the scale of this catastrophe, Labour moderates are stoically refusing to hit the panic button. There will be no fresh wave of Shadow Cabinet resignations, or calls for a new leadership election. And that is because Corbyn’s opponents finally believe they have him contained.

One senior Labour MP told me: ‘It’s moving. The activists aren’t quite ready to ditch him yet, so there’s no point jumping in now. But it’s shifting.’

There is also a sense that tackling Corbyn is now of less significance to Labour’s long-term prospects than getting to grips with the Gordian knot of Brexit.

‘We’re about to get into the hard, granular detail of the negotiations,’ a Shadow Minister explained. ‘If we start squabbling among ourselves and aren’t seen to properly hold the Government to account, that will really damage us.’

MAYBE. But that thesis rests on two very big assumptions. Namely, that Corbyn is indeed Patient Zero. And Labour’s core brand has proved resistant to the contagion.

That Corbyn’s leadership has been an unmitigated disaster is no longer open to debate. Oppositions simply do not lose by-elections to the Government of the day.

And they certainly don’t lose almost seven years after that Government took office, mid-term, and less than 12 months after the incumbent Prime Minister uncer- emoniously departed Downing Street. But anyone who thinks Labour’s problems began on September 12, 2015, when Corbyn was elected, are deluding themselves.

When he finally falls on his sword – or Theresa May plunges it into him sometime in 2020 – it will mean seven of the last eight men to be elected Labour leader will have failed to win a General Election, spanning a period of 46 years. And the one man who broke that trend is more despised by Labour activists than all the others combined.

This does not reflect a party that enjoys a healthy constitution. Instead, it is a party that has spent the past half-century fighting to avoid its final death-rattle.

Speak to any Labour MP and they offer differing diagnoses.

Corbyn, obviously. The split over Brexit. The division between the activists and the parliamentary party. Labour’s metropolitan/working-class divide.

But what they fail to see – or simply cannot bear to see – is that each of these issues is merely a symptom of Labour’s decline, rather than the cause of it.

In 1997 Labour won Stoke with 66 per cent of the vote. By 2005 that was down to 52 per cent. By 2010 39. On Friday it was 37.

In Copeland the trend is almost identical – 58 per cent, 50, 46, 37.

For most of that period, Corbyn was delivering rabble-rousing speeches to half-full rooms of Trotskyists, or the vegetables on his allotment.

It was others who were sowing the seeds of Labour’s demise.

Today the cry is ‘Jeremy is toxic on the doorsteps’. But less than two years ago it was ‘Ed is toxic on the doorsteps’. Before that, ‘Gordon is toxic on the doorsteps’. Before that, ‘Tony is toxic on the doorsteps’.

Jeremy Corbyn isn’t Patient Zero, he’s Patient Number Eight, and counting.

Despite this, Labour MPs honestly believe they have him in quarantine. And to be fair, the decision by the moderates to step back and let him take sole ownership of Labour’s strategy – and by extension implosion – has worked.

He no longer has a gang of ‘Red Tories’ to define himself against, and even his strongest supporters are now incapable of mounting a coherent defence of his leadership or agenda.

BUT that vacuum is also helping to perpetuate a lethal delusion – the idea that once Corbyn goes, Labour’s problems go with him. The shadow Shadow Cabinet – Chuka Umunna, Dan Jarvis, Lisa Nandy, Clive Lewis, Yvette Cooper – are now playing an elaborate game of Ring A Ring O’ Roses. Just hide and wait and pray for the plague to pass.

There is no evidence it will. On Friday the extent of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s reaction to the Copeland catastrophe was a series of hand-wringing statements that ‘the country needs Labour’.

But that is the point. The country has decided it doesn’t. Voters see a party that has no coherent policy on Brexit. That has not had a coherent economic or fiscal policy for decades, and as a result has no coherent policy on public service provision. That adopts stances on defence, law and order and immigration that are not just incoherent, but overtly provocative.

And the country has decided something else.

Until Friday morning, Labour MPs believed that they had one thing to fall back on – their Northern safe zone.

Time and again I have been told: ‘People in my area hate Corbyn but they hate the Tories even more. Ukip might be a problem. But they won’t vote Conservative.’

Northern voters will vote Conservative. Corbyn has not just helped complete the toxification of the Labour brand, he has also begun the process of detoxifying the Tory brand, a process the Prime Minister fully intends to finish.

The virus is not on the doorstep, but is coursing through Labour’s system. There is no antidote. There is no cure.